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Tuesday, May 27, 2014

DreadOut First Impressions

About two weeks ago, an indie horror game by the name of DreadOut was released on Steam. Since I've always been a fan of horror games, I figured I'd give it a shot and possibly review it as well. So the review might take a little while but I thought I'd share my thoughts on the game so far.

First off, I'd like to address the fact that this game is going to have two parts. The first part was just released and the second part will be free DLC. I'm not entirely a fan of this new idea of releasing incomplete games, but it seems to be the popular thing to do now.

The graphics are a mix of abysmal and decent. So far the environments haven't been too bad, although they look like they are from the PS2/Xbox era of game design. The characters and the player character themselves are mediocre at best, and often the textures are very low quality and look strange on the model they are placed on. Although this works out well for the ghosts, as their terrible design actually makes them even more terrifying then they would be ordinarily.

I wasn't expecting much in terms of the voice acting for this game since it is an indie, but some of the voices and dialogue are absolutely painful to listen to. Not as bad as Daylight, but still pretty awful.

Although so far the atmosphere in the game is spectacular, it pulls of creepy very well. It has been a fairly intense experience so far, although the clunky controls break some of that immersion. Combined with seemingly no ammunition or limits to how you use the cell phone camera to fight ghosts, and the fact that none of the ghosts are particular dangerous I'm concerned that the game may end up becoming too easy. The horror will fade away if the ghosts don't feel threatening, as their creepy looks will only work for so long.

But so far, it has been a fairly decent experience. Stay tuned, I'll hopefully have a review sometime in the couple of days to a week.